I'd like to back this up. I haven't done any research on circumvention
usage for a couple of years, but it doesn't pass the sniff test to claim
that a majority of the 500 million Chinese Internet users are on VPNs.
Such widespread VPN usage would have large, obvious impacts on the basic
structure of the Internet.
The sort of Chinese folks who talk to Wired reporters are likely to be
on VPNs, but very few Chinese folks are the sort who talk to Wired
reporters.
-hal
On 1/10/13 6:22 AM, Martin Johnson wrote:
I am in China.
Google is said to have a 5% market share in China. There are at least
500 million Internet users so that makes for about 25 million users. The
number of users using VPNs or circumvention tools is unknown but likely
much smaller. For example, Twitter is estimated to have less than 20,000
active users in China
(https://en.greatfire.org/blog/2013/jan/there-are-not-millions-twitter-users-china-heres-proof).
Commercial VPNs require credit cards to sign up and are used by very
few. Free circumvention tools like FreeGate reach many more but are also
continuously targeted by authorities making them slow and unstable.
Users who can circumvent the GFW do not always do it. Connecting is slow
and, for running a general Google search, unnecessary.
All this means that Google's user experience without a VPN matters a
lot. Because of the decision they took in December, that user experience
got worse.
The users Wired talked to were not representative of Chinese netizens.
As for the Techcrunch statements, "sources suggest" doesn't make it
true. But it is true that "since the notification feature was
implemented, access to Google’s search engine in China has been blocked
more often than usual". That is, it was blocked once (on November 9) as
opposed to "usual" which is that it isn't blocked. This blocking being
part of Google's decision to disable the feature was exactly the
argument that we were making. The authorities blocked Google and likely
used this and the threat to permanently block it to pressure Google into
doing their bidding.
Martin Johnson
Founder
https://GreatFire.org - Monitoring Online Censorship In China.
https://FreeWeibo.com - Uncensored, Anonymous Sina Weibo Search.
https://Unblock.cn.com - We Can Unblock Your Website In China.
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 8:01 PM, Maxim Kammerer <m...@dee.su
<mailto:m...@dee.su>> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 1:03 PM, Martin Johnson
<greatf...@greatfire.org <mailto:greatf...@greatfire.org>> wrote:
> Yes, the question is what you call "working well". The
censorship-warning
> feature added last year was clearly improving the user
experience. Removing
> it worsened the user experience again.
Is this backed up by actual user experiences from China?
“When Wired.co.uk <http://Wired.co.uk> spoke to a few Chinese
residents about the disabled
Google feature, they were not even aware of it because they used VPNs,
demonstrating Google might not be taking into account just how savvy
its users are at all.” [1]
“Sources close to the matter suggest Google pulled the feature because
it was making it more difficult for users to access its search
services. […] However, since the notification feature was implemented,
access to Google’s search engine in China has been blocked more often
than usual […] meaning even fewer users were able to use Google
search.” [2]
[1]
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-01/04/google-china-anti-censorship-fail
[2]
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/04/google-quietly-removes-censorship-warning-feature-for-search-users-in-china/
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Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
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Hal Roberts
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Harvard University
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